Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva and today we’re talking about the five-step cycle to keep you productive.
How many of you struggle to stay productive? Procrastination hits, raise your hand. I know it does for all of us from time to time, and there are reasons for it. And if we can uncover those reasons and get to the root of why we get stuck, why we take breaks, why we feel frustrated, why we see some people soar to the top and some people stagnate.
One of the things I’m obsessed over, I call it the Oprah effect. What is it that Oprah did that made her Oprah? I’m truly fascinated by the woman. I think she’s just phenomenal and amazing and so inspiring, but why do I feel that way about her? What is it that she has done that other people haven’t and if you’ve not studied her life, you should. She’s just absolutely incredible in all that she does, but she could’ve been just an average talk show host. She could’ve just been a news anchor, right, and no one would even know her name. She’d have been forgotten long ago had she not made some very strategic decisions. I am mind blown by that on a daily basis.
So when I think about what we need to do to stay productive, I believe there are five steps and I want to walk through all five of those steps with you today.
Now, last week on the show, we talked a little bit about different ways of showing up to life and to business. We talked about being a dreamer, a doer, a dreamer who does, and then somebody who’s in limbo, waiting on the sidelines, trying to decide what to do.
No matter where you fall, I hope that this episode really helps you and keeps you moving forward, and I hope it allows you to catch yourself and to say, “Hmm, this is where I get hung up often. This is where I cut corners. This is where I could probably dive deeper,” because if you can deeply understand these five steps, productivity’s going to be off the charts and your procrastination’s going to fade into the sunset.
So let’s start right at the top. Number one is super solid vision. I consider myself a dreamer. I have been trained to be a dreamer who does, but I’m naturally just a dreamer. I really like the vision stuff. I really like the dreaming. I could create 16 businesses tomorrow if I could find enough doers to run them for me, like I’ve got no shortage of vision.
I talk to a lot of people in this industry who are wired that way. Big, big dreams, lots and lots of ideas, big, big goals. But how do you actually see them through without feeling overwhelmed, without having to take a break, right? Very common. I think what happens for so many people is that rather than having a singular vision and then creating vision within that vision, they’re just dreaming up ideas all the time. It’s beautiful and it’s coming from a place of inspiration, right? Like we talked about last week, those who love to learn and there’s nothing wrong with it, but I think that you can become so caught up in the vision casting that the last four steps never even hit and that’s a problem for people.
Now for doers or for those who are sitting on the sidelines, waiting to decide, “Is this career even for me? I’m a new stylist, I don’t even know where to start,” friend, you don’t even have a vision. Who’s your mentor? Who are you going to learn from? Who has the career that you’re hoping to achieve? Are you studying them on a daily basis? And then we take vision even further.
For me, what was really important was to create a vision for my life. I talk about vision and mission statements in Thriving Leadership and what it means to create them. Often when people are going through that process, they’ll ask me, “Is it okay to have a personal and a professional vision?” I think it’s critical. The personal vision is what you want to achieve in this lifetime and that’s something I’m obsessed with. When I think about Oprah, I tend to think that her personal vision was quite clear, very clear. I think she knew the life she wanted to live and then worked backwards to create it. I really do. I don’t think she’s just been on this YOLO, jumping-in-every-opportunity adventure. I really don’t.
I think Oprah says no more than she says yes and she’s able to do that. She doesn’t chase shiny objects because she doesn’t have to because she knows her life, vision, and the super sick opportunities that come her way that aren’t in alignment with her vision, she says no to them so easily because it’s not aligned. It’s not that it’s not a cool opportunity. It just doesn’t make sense for her.
I started living my life that way a couple years back and declining even really rad opportunities when they didn’t fit in with my vision, and can I just tell you, my marriage is better, I’m a better mother, I’m a better friend, my business is better. Everything is so much better by saying no more. It’s so ironic.
When we think about vision, I ask you to think about what is the legacy you’re looking to create in this lifetime. What is the life you want to live? Don’t chase the money. If you have a vision around money, you’re already going to fail. It’s why so many people open salons only to close them five years later, become an educator only to shut down within three years, become a big deal stylist only to fade into the sunset three years later and they’re struggling to get by.
If you’re like me and you’ve been in the industry for some time, I want you to think about some of the Instagram influencers you followed five or six years ago, even more, seven years ago. How many of those people are you still obsessed with? One, two, none at all? They faded into the sunset for you. I tend to think it’s because unfortunately their vision wasn’t strong enough and they were a big deal stylist for a time until somebody better came along. Somebody more interesting. Somebody with fresh vision.
Clients like to see somebody who’s inspired. Clients don’t like to see somebody who’s burnt out, and the burnout comes when the vision isn’t clear, so really spend the time on your vision. Don’t let it be about money. Let it be about the life you want to live, what you are on this planet to do in this lifetime, and what comes easy to you.
That’s the other thing I found too. A lot of people who were doers or who are on the sidelines and they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t even know if this industry is for me.” First of all, why did you get into it in the first place? What were you hoping was possible? And why have you now convinced yourself that that’s not possible? Cause you wouldn’t be at a crossroads where you’re thinking about leaving the industry if you didn’t think that that initial vision was possible. You’d be here.
So many stylists today get to a point in their career where they’re killing it. And they’re like, “…and now I need a new challenge.” I’m like “What?” When you get to the point where you’re killing it, you’re supposed to be in Bali for six weeks. You’re supposed to be enjoying life. And you’re like, “No, let’s make it harder.”
I think sometimes we get so caught up in the like bigger, better game, and often it is because of money. If you go back to your vision of life—and listen, I’m somebody who’s crazy driven. I’m a weirdo and I like to spend my Sundays working all day. That’s not typical and if that’s not for you, totally understandable.
But what is it that you’re trying to achieve? And are you on that path? It’s just what I want you to think about and really think about why you got into this industry, what your vision is, and if you are fully working in alignment with it.
The next step of the cycle is education. For most people who are tired, burnt out, lost, uninspired, appear to be not driven, it’s just because they’re not educated. There is so much pain that comes from lack of education. It’s so wild to me.
A lot of salon owners who complain about their stylists who they label as lazy, I’m like “Friend, they’re not lazy. They’re lost. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know why to do it. You’re not really—I mean, are we being candid here? You’re not really demonstrating a great example. You yourself are overwhelmed. You’re not showing up in full so they’re not even being modeled an example of what success looks like.”
That, I mean, that’s how I felt when I went into my salon. As I looked around and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s literally nobody here who’s living the life I want to live.”
Now, I want to be respectful. That’s not to say that some of the stylists I was working for as an assistant weren’t making great money. A lot of ’em were making great money, but I looked at their lifestyle and I was like, “It’s just not for me. This is not what I pictured for myself, and I had to really dig into education to figure out what it was going to take for me to get to where I wanted to be.
This is a corner I think often gets cut. People see a stylist on social and they’re like, “Oh cool. I’ll just copy what they do and then I’ll have what they have.” No, you’re jumping into their journey eight years in. You need to go back to step one, and that’s not to say you do what they did back in 2017. Those days have faded out, but you can’t copy the mega influencer and get the same results. They’re on a different phase of the journey. That’s why I talk about the five stages of Instagram in Thriving Stylist Method, right? It’s critical.
I think we assume that we get little bits and pieces of information and we know the full story. The more deeply you educate yourself, the better you’ll be, the more productive you’ll be.
I spent one year without a mentor. I will never do that again. I spent real big on education again this year and I’m watching how impactful it is on my life and my business. I’m like, “What was I thinking?” And it wasn’t even that I thought I knew it all. I had convinced myself education was too expensive and that it was too time-consuming, and those are our two greatest resources, right? Money and time. And I was like, “Ah, I just don’t want to spend my money and time in that area.” How stupid, because I probably would’ve ended up with more time and more money had I made the investment, but I cut corners like a lot of us do from time to time. We’re like, “Well, I’ll just read books and listen to podcasts and follow influencers and figure it out.” I had done that too. What a tremendous mistake.
So once you have the vision, get yourself the education.
Next is the execution. Now I have to read you the message that sparked this episode. This came in from Serena. Serena, thank you so much for connecting with me. This means a lot. So Serena said, “I think for me, the thing I need the most right now is improvement in growth mindset. I’m in the middle of a rebrand and I have all these ideas of what I want to do, but I have a hard time allowing myself strategic experimenting. I don’t want to make the wrong decision, but I also need to make a decision to learn from.” Yes, you do. So the ideas and plans are going well, but the execution needs help. Does that make sense? A hundred percent it makes sense.
Serena is definitely a dreamer. Making the vision, not a problem for her. Serena could make six brand boards. She could make brand boards for all of us, not an issue, and they’d all be beautiful and they’d be great. But like she’s saying, the strategic experimentation is where she’s held up. She can’t pull the trigger. Common, Serena. I think it’s lack of education and fear of execution.
Serena, you either don’t know your target market well enough, like you need to go back and educate further. A lot of people do this. They know their target market—like how many layers are there to the skin. Don’t tell somebody’s cosmetology teacher that I can’t remember that, I don’t want to be failed back from 2007, right? There’s the dermis, the epidermis, there’s all these layers. Often with the target market, we barely get past the external. You need to go so deep that there’s no question of what the branding should be. No question. You should be able to look in 2.5 seconds and say yes or no. If you can’t, you’ve not done enough research.
So the education screwed you up, right? If the brand is just something you love, you can throw it in the trash can. It has to be something that your clientele loves and if you don’t know enough about your target market client or what it takes to build a brand, then your vision and your education are failing you and the execution’s going to be poor.
Serena, I think that you’re caught up because you need to further educate yourself on what the brand should look like, because then it just becomes so crystal clear. But then when we get to step three, which is the execution, flip and do it, just do it. So many of us get caught up because of the fear of failure is what it usually boils down to. Fear of judgment, fear of failure, fear of making a mistake, and we’re afraid that that mistake will cost us time and money.
It always comes down to those resources over and over and over. So instead we don’t execute at all. The irony is what do you lose when you don’t execute? Time and money. The exact thing that we’re holding off on executing for is what you’re losing anyway. You’re already losing it, so you might as well pull the trigger, take the shot and maybe something amazing will happen. That’s why they call them leaps of faith.
There is this great video and it makes me upset every single time I talk about this because it’s a Steve Harvey video I saw a couple years back and it just is playing in my mind every single day. And I can’t find the clip and it drives me bonkers, cause I’d love to be able to share it in full, but he talks about how nobody successful played it safe. Everybody successful did things that they didn’t believe were possible. Everybody successful worked to a point where they didn’t even know if they could take it anymore. Everybody successful did things that pissed some people off. That’s what it looks like, right?
When you look at somebody like Kobe Bryant, I mean, now that he’s passed, you hear people telling these incredible stories about him, like other pro-NBA players who were like, “You know, we’d go to a combine or some kind of camp,” and they’d say, “I wanted to be the first guy on the court in the morning. So we were supposed to show up at 8:00 AM. I’d wake up at 4:00 AM and I’d go downstairs to the court and Kobe will have still been up from the night before. The man hasn’t even gone to bed yet. So I’m coming on the court at 4:00 AM thinking I’m two steps ahead. Kobe is finishing up the overnight practice he hosted for himself. He’s going to shower, sleep for two hours and join us all on the court at 8:00 AM.” That’s a different level of drive. It’s a different level of execution. I’m not saying you should work all night long like that. But when you look at people who are successful, they’re willing to take chances. They’re willing to do more. They’re willing to mess up because until you have those failures, you won’t know what to do to be successful. You will learn your greatest lessons from your failures. Every single time I have failed so many times, sometimes very publicly, but that’s how I learn what not to do and that’s what guides you on your path.
When you play safe and when you stay quiet and you don’t pull triggers for fear of loss of money or loss of time, loss of money and time is exactly what you’re going to get. So you have to just execute. Just go for it.
Number four, refinement. So like I said, you’re going to execute and it’s going to be bad. You’re going to make mistakes. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not playing full out. You’re going to execute and you’re going to screw up. Sometimes when you make those mistakes, you were fine.
Now let’s say you execute and you don’t mess up. You execute. And you’re like, “That went better than I expected.” Why? What about that went well and was that the desired result?
One of the things is sometimes we’ll post something on social and it will go viral. Like it’ll be huge. And my team will be like, “That was amazing. Should we do more of that?” And we’ll say, “I don’t know yet. Let’s analyze it.” And we’ll look at the reason it went viral and if the reason it went viral isn’t an alignment with the business vision, we never do that again.
Sometimes it’s the wrong kind of reaction. Or sometimes we get a reaction, but from the wrong target market. Again, no matter how exciting or splashy it was, if it’s not in alignment with the vision, we don’t do it anymore.
With the refinement, you have to look at the things that went well, the things that went poorly and did you get the result you were looking for. Something that people do a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, and you see this in the influencers in our industry—and I talk about the influencers because I know for a lot of us, that’s the north star. We look at these stylists with these massive social followings. But if you look at their social following and you look at how many of the people who follow them are local potential clients, it’s quite small, generally speaking, which is why you see these stylists deciding to be educators, which is great. So if they want to be an educator full time and full out, perfect, then they’re building in the right arena and getting that attention is great.
A lot of people start educating and traveling and realizing they don’t want to live life on the road, but now they’ve built this platform based around teaching stylists and their at-home clientele is limited because their messaging is around connecting with stylists.
It’s not wrong. It’s fine. But it goes back to the initial vision. Is that the life you want to live for yourself? If it is, amazing, you’re nailing it. If not, how do you get back on track, right?
Refining. Did you post something that got a really great response from our industry, but you’re really trying to make $300,000 a year behind the chair with your own clientele working three days a week? Because then you might have missed the mark.
Thinking about refining your actions, the result that you got, and what it is you’re trying to achieve is super duper important.
Next, analyze. Going back to all the actions you’ve taken since you educated, since you executed, since you refined, analyze, “Okay, where am I today? Where is my business today? Where are my finances today? Where is my marketing today? Where is my guest service experience today? Who am I hiring? Who is looking to work for me at this salon? What clients are being attracted to me? And am I still working in alignment with the vision?”
I want you to imagine this like a circle with vision being right at the top, and then you go a little bit around a clock. Three o’clock is education and then six o’clock is execution and then refinement is like eight and then analyze is 11:00 PM. You have to go around this circle to get back to vision. When you’re in the analyze section, asking yourself, “But was all this worth it? Did it get me the result I wanted?” Because sometimes you’ll go through all that. You’ll educate yourself, you’ll execute, you’ll refine, and then you’re like, “Well, I did a lot of work and it didn’t give me the result I wanted,” then don’t do that anymore.
There’s a stylist who reached out to me probably about 18 months ago and was like, “I’m blowing up on TikTok. I think that you should coach to TikTok. It’s amazing. I want to be here.” And I was like, “You know, I’m still watching, observing. And when it becomes something that you can build local small business from, definitely something I want to bring in and talk about more,” right? And now we’ve had some guest speakers come into our Monthly Meetups and talk about TikTok because it’s changed a lot. Well, wouldn’t you know, that same stylist probably a year after they initially DM’d me was like, “Well, what should I do? I have a huge following on TikTok. I’m spending a lot of time and effort there and it’s not producing more clients for me.” That’s when you get to the analyze. The vision was good. The education was good. The execution good. Obviously, they made a big following. I’m certain they refined and that’s why they continued to build. But when they analyze, this is not leading to their vision, right? And so you have to go through the cycle and ask yourself, “Am I doing the right things?”
Now, if you analyze and everything is going well, amazing, circle back to the vision and say, “Now what can I do?” We call it—in my business, we call it getting back in the sandbox. Once you’ve gone through a cycle of work and productivity, then you get to get back in the visionary sandbox and say, “Cool, what can I play with next?”
And remember, it’s a piece of the bigger vision. What chunk of this vision do I want to tackle next? Educate yourself on it, execute on it, learn some lessons, refine it, analyze the results, and get back to vision.
The thing that plagues a lot of us in the industry is we love vision. We skip education. We just cut our corners there and think we know it all. I do that too. Admittedly, I do that too. We execute, but then we don’t refine or analyze.
So we got vision, execute, vision, execute, vision, execute, right? And we pull a lot of triggers and that’s why we get burnt out because all you’re doing is getting excited and doing stuff, getting excited and doing stuff, but you’re not taking a look at is this actually producing what I want?
That’s why we feel really tired.
Does anybody feel like you’re working really, really, really hard, but you’re not getting ahead at the pace that you want to? You’re likely missing something in this cycle. So really ask yourself, where am I getting stuck? Do I have a clear vision for my life and how to get there? Am I educating myself on what I need to ensure that I’m not wasting a bunch of time and money? Am I executing? Am I going full out or am I staying in? I call it marinating. Am I staying in marinating mode where I’m thinking, thinking, pondering is this right? Should I do this? Hmm. Ask more people. Am I going for it without the fear of making some mistakes or am I just playing it safe? Am I refining what I’ve been doing and what’s been done? And then am I analyzing my results?
Really ask yourself and then have that moment where you’re like, where can I be better? Where can I do more? Where can I tighten things up so that I can actually make progress?
All right. I hope this has provided some clarity for you. This is certainly huge in me being more productive. For me, like I mentioned, I’ve got to focus more on education this year, big time. And I’m in analyze mode every single day. So I want you to find the areas where you feel like you could get sharper and go all the heck in. All right, you guys, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
